[lbo-talk] Caudwell on on language's inability to reflect the changing nature of reality

[Charles Brown]

"Reality constitutes for us our environment. and our environment ,
which is chiefly social, alters continuously -sometimes barely
perceptibly, sometimes at dizzy speeds. The socially accepted pictures
we make in words of reality cannot change as if they were reflections
in a mirror. An object is reflected in a mirror. An object is
reflected in a mirror. If the object moves the reflection moves. But
in language reality is symbolised in unchanging words which give a
false stability and permanence to the object they represent. Thus they
instantaneously photograph reality rather than reflect it. This frigid
character of language is regrettable but it has utilitarian purposes .
It is probably the only way in which man, with his linear
consciousness, can get a grip of fluid reality. Language, as it
develops, shows more and more of this false permanence, till we arrive
at the Platonic Ideas, Eternal and Perfect Words. Their eternity and
perfection are simply the permanence of print and paper. If you coin a
word or write a symbol to describe an entity or event, the word will
remain 'eternally' unchanged even while the entity has changed and the
event is no longer present. This permanence is part of the inescapable
nature of symbolism, which is expressed in the rules of logic. It is
one of the strange freaks of the human mind that it is supposed that
reality must obey the rules of logic, whereas the correct view is that
symbolism by its very nature has certain rules, expressed in laws of
logic,and these are nothing to do with the process of reality, but
represent the nature of the symbolic process itself." - Christopher
Caudwell  from  "A Study of the Bourgeois Artist" in _Studies in s
Dying Culture_